"Dad?"
I froze, careful to make sure I didn't let even a drop of the motor oil I was holding fall into the burgeoning potion.
Setting the bottle down and making sure to cap the lid, I looked over at the wooden skull sitting on a nearby shelf in my apartment's workroom. The green eye-lights were focused on me, and maybe it was all my experience working with another spirit of intellect, but I felt like I could read Bonea's mood pretty well. She seemed...anxious.
"Yeah, Bonnie?" I might have enjoyed the wordplay of the name I'd picked out for my incorporeal daughter, but the nickname her sister and I had settled on flowed off the tongue a lot better.
I expected her to ask whatever was on her mind right then and there...but instead the usually chipper spirit did something I'd never seen from her before.
She held her tongue.
Bonea could be, at the best of times, a bit much for someone my age. Ask her about vampires and she could just as easily start spouting off about the various courts in precise detail, or start talking about pop-culture stuff I already knew.
The kid had a lot of knowledge, and she was excited to share what she knew and try to find some way to bind it to real world stuff. Which added up into a pretty talkative spirit.
But even without a facial expression to read, I could tell that Bonea was struggling to find the right words to use. It reminded me of how her sister, Maggie, would spend minutes, or even hours, trying to find a way to tell me something she didn't want to talk about.
I started to get worried. Was this something serious? Had she gotten some kind of...psychic ping from Bob or...I had no clue, but my spooky senses were tingling.
Which was why her actual question completely threw me for a loop.
Her words came out of the skull hesitantly, like she was afraid to even ask them. "Do you love me?"
I blinked.
"What?"
"Do you love me?"
Taking a long, shuddering breath, I tried to get my brain to switch mental gears as quickly as I could. Okay, so, not a huge spooky-side problem, a dad problem.
Which, honestly, was probably worse. I had a lot more experience in fighting monsters and solving mysteries than I did being a father to either of my kids.
I met Bonea's green eye-lights, trying to think of how to actually respond. "Yeah? Of course, I do."
Maybe not the best response I could have given, but cut me some slack! I wasn't exactly sure how to respond to one of my girls asking me a question like that. Hell's bells, talking about my feelings in general was still a hard ask on the best of days.
Still, from her continued silence, I knew what I'd said hadn't really done the trick, so I pushed. "Bonea, you're my daughter, and I love you." I made sure the words rang out with capital p Power, just a little, enough to make it obvious I wasn't just whistling Dixie.
"...okay. I believe you."
The little spark of joy I could hear in her voice got a smile to start playing on the edges of my lips, but I had to know what sparked this. "Why are you asking?"
Somehow, I got the distinct impression that my noncorporeal daughter shrugged at me. "You say it to Maggie a lot. Your average is 2.5 times a day, from what I've been able to observe. But that's the first time you've ever said it to me."
I opened my mouth to argue, but then stopped myself. Unlike me, a fallible fleshy wizard, Bonea has perfect memory, part of the package as a spirit of intellect. She'd know about what I'd said and not said better than I did.
That didn't really make the pill easier to swallow. Empty night, had I not told one of my daughters that I loved her? My mouth was suddenly dry, and it was hard not to feel like the biggest failure of a father there had ever been.
Some part of me, the one I wish would shut up more, was all too happy to bring up an excuse. Unlike Maggie, Bonea wasn't a human being, only a spirit. She didn't think or feel things in the same way that humans did, so how was I supposed to know that she'd noticed some parental favoritism?
Her nature as a spirit was certainly the cause of the issue, I realized, but that wasn't an excuse. From the moment I'd seen her in my subconscious, I'd known: Bonea was my daughter, period.
"I'm sorry, Bonnie. I promise to say it more often, and try to catch you up to Maggie."
"In order for you to do that, you'd need to say it at least five times a day for seven months!"
Her tone had returned to its usual chipper vigor, so I took that as a sign we could get back to making this potion.
Man, I had gotten rusty. Back when I'd first started out as a private investigator, I'd made stuff like this all the time, but along the way potions had taken a backseat to fallen angel coins and deals with queens of Faerie.
I'd just finished infusing the ingredients with my magic, and transferred the finished product into a plastic sports bottle, when Bonea threw another question at me.
"What was my mother like?"
At least this one didn't completely derail my train of thought, leaving me free to grab some tape and a marker, and clearly label the bottle with its effects. It gave me time to think through my response a little.
"You have her memories, don't you?"
So sue me, it was a real weasel-y reply, but the details on stuff like that were still pretty up in the air.
The skull hummed. "No, but also yes? I know what she knew, and what you know, but I don't think that includes personal experiences. Or if it does, I can't find them."
The concept still astounded me. Being born with that much information already stuffed into her head, but with no real way to tell what was useful and what was pancake recipes.
It looked like it was up to me to explain what she wanted, then. No easy out for Harry Dresden, as usual. "Your mother's name was Lash. She was...an imprint in my head, from a fallen angel named Lasciel. Her entire purpose was to get me to accept Lasciel, let her into my head, which would have killed Lash. I refused to give in, though, and at some point Lash stopped being a copy and became her own person." It still hurt to talk about her, even a decade after she had died.
From that, Bonea had a wide spattering of questions. "Why did you name her Lash? Why would she want to do something that would kill her? How did mother become different from Lasciel?"
I did my best to answer the questions, but with Bonea that was like trying to run up an active avalanche.
Eventually, the flood of why's stopped, and I could finish the story. "She sacrificed herself to save me. It was the love it took to do that, that's what made you."
I grabbed the skull and took her into the apartment's living room with me. Maggie was still at school, meaning it was just the two of us. I was about ready for a nap, after having gotten maybe three hours of sleep the night before trying to help the flesh-and-blood daughter with her night terrors.
It seemed like my story satisfied the curious spirit, but as I was about to doze off, she asked me one last thing. "Do you think mother would have loved me?"
The question sent a sharp stab of pain into my heart. I'd avoided thinking about Lash as best I could, and wondering what she would have thought of the child we'd made together wasn't exactly the kind of thing that made me happy.
It just reminded me she wasn't here anymore.
Still, Bonnie deserved an answer.
I don't know if the one I gave her was true, but it was one that felt right.
"Yeah, kiddo. She would have loved you."